Not Everything Can Be Important (and That’s the Point)
By now, the glitter has been vacuumed up, the holiday playlists have gone quiet, and January has done what January does best: arrive loudly, with opinions.
New year. New goals. New routines. New pressure.
And yet, here we are. Some goals already checked off. Some quietly abandoned. Some never really ours to begin with. And if you’re feeling a little… overwhelmed by all the noise? You’re not alone.
In a world that treats everything like a five-alarm fire. Every email is urgent. Every goal is non-negotiable. Every productivity hack is apparently life-changing. It’s exhausting, and also mathematically impossible.
My wish for you, as the baseline for the year ahead, is clarity on what’s important and what’s not that important…because NOT everything can be important.
Enter: RI and NRI.
- RI = Really Important
- NRI = Not Really Important (NRI comes from my days in oil and gas where NRI was, in fact, incredibly important. But now, something that was once so important, has taught me a whole big life lesson in this season, about what's not really important).
That’s it. No fancy framework. No color-coded spreadsheet. Just an honest sorting mechanism for a very noisy world.
RI gets your energy, your attention, your best hours.
NRI still exists, but it doesn’t get to run the show.
And this is where January reflection gets interesting. Look back at the last month - not with judgment, but with curiosity.
What goals have you already crossed off?
What habits stuck without forcing?
What fell apart the moment real life showed up?
Now ask yourself: were those things actually RI? Or were they loud, shiny, socially-approved NRIs pretending to matter more than they did?
If you didn’t follow through, it might not mean you failed. It might mean your system correctly rejected something that didn’t belong in the RI bucket.
We tend to confuse importance with urgency. Visibility with value. Effort with worth.
But the things that truly move the needle, the ones that make life feel lighter, calmer, more aligned, are often boring. Subtle. Repetitive. They don’t announce themselves on January 1st. They quietly prove themselves over time.
And the NRIs? They’re loud. They love a rebrand. They thrive in comparison culture and thrive even more on guilt. They show up as “shoulds” and “everyone else is doing this” and “I’ll feel better once…”
Spoiler: you won’t.
Because when you bucket your life into RI and NRI, something powerful happens:
the noise grows quieter and louder all at once. It’s subtle (quieter) but clearer and obvious (loud).
You stop chasing every signal. You stop reacting to every ask. You stop mistaking motion for meaning.
And suddenly, the post-holiday hangover isn’t something to “fix.”
It’s information. It informs your next best action where best = aligned.
It’s your nervous system saying, we don’t need to carry all of this forward.
So as we move out of January and into the part of the year that actually counts: the lived-in, imperfect, beautiful middle, consider this your permission slip:
Let some things be NRI.
Let some goals expire.
Let some numbers lose their grip.
Not everything is important.
And the things that truly are?
They don’t need to shout.
And once you see the difference between RI and NRI, you can’t unsee it.
The goal isn’t to care less.
It’s to care on purpose.